Little Lies(34)

I had a panic attack in the middle of someone’s front walk because boys dressed as clowns scared me. Usually when I have one, there isn’t an audience, or at least not one like this. My parents and brothers and maybe my cousins might be witnesses, but not the neighborhood kids who will whisper about me. And this will be another reason for River to be overprotective, and for me to want to hide from the world.

As if he knows what I’m thinking, Kodiak whispers, “We made a wall around you. You’re protected, Lavender. The boys are gone, and no one knows you’re here. We can cut across the front lawn and go back to my house, if that would make it better. I can show you what I made the other day when I was at Queenie’s.”

Kodiak has anxiety too, so he also goes to see Queenie. But he’s better at managing his most of the time. He has other things that make life difficult, though, like always wanting everything to be perfect, including himself. Mom says it’s impossible to be perfect, so he’s always setting himself up to fail, and it makes me sad.

Kodiak gets straight A’s all the time, but if he gets one question wrong on a test, he has a meltdown. They’re not the same as mine. He folds in on himself, a broken lawn chair. Beats himself up. Pushes himself too hard until he cracks, like a chip in a windshield that spiders out until the whole thing threatens to shatter. He usually manages to pull himself back together before it gets to that point. But not always.

Kodiak slips his hands in mine and pulls me to my feet. River nudges him out of the way and puts his arm around me, hiding me in his cape. All I want is the calm Kodiak brings, but now I have River’s possessive anger and his guilt because he didn’t see the boys with the masks before it was too late.

Sometimes it’s hard to balance the things I want with the things that make me feel bad, like River’s guilt and his overprotectiveness. And how much I like the attention from Kodiak.





Chapter Twelve


Exposed

Lavender

Present day

“HAVE YOU TRIED talking to Kody?”

I have video therapy with Queenie today. Usually my sessions are more spread out, but with all the changes that have come with a new college and living away from home for the first time, we decided to add a few. “I don’t know that talking would be particularly helpful,” I tell her. I produce a heart marshmallow from my box of Lucky Charms and eat it.

“Why is that?”

“Because so far, every conversation I’ve had with him has reinforced all the reasons he stopped talking to me in the first place.”

Queenie turns her head to the side, staring off at something in the distance. Her jaw tenses briefly, and she taps her lips. Sometimes I wonder how hard this is for her, because she knows both sides of this story. I’m not sure if she still talks to Kodiak the way she does me, but for a lot of years, she treated both of us.

“My relationship with him was like an untended garden,” I blurt out.

She turns back, a small smile tipping up one corner of her mouth. “That’s an interesting comparison. Would you like to elaborate?”

“Well, if a garden is left untended, the weeds creep in and take over, don’t they? No matter how careful you are, if you don’t take care of it, they’ll choke out everything beautiful, suffocate the delicate blossoms and replace them with hardy, ugly, impossible-to-eradicate parasites.”

Queenie nods. “What other principle does this apply to?”

I think for a moment, putting together all the pieces of my past with Kodiak. “Dependency.” I fish another marshmallow out of the box and flip it between my fingers. “Kodiak became my drug. I did things I knew would send me into a tailspin. And I didn’t use any of the strategies we’d worked on because I wanted him to help me.”

“To be fair, it wasn’t one-sided,” Queenie says softly. “But eventually you learned to depend on yourself again.”

“I know.”

Kodiak was complicit in our demise, determined to save me every single time.

For me, someone who felt powerless most of the time, it was a terrible, wonderful, heady feeling.

But it was me who single-handedly obliterated our friendship. He was the delicate flower, and I was the clinging vine. It was me who broke the beautiful, genius boy with a savior complex—one he could never satisfy, because the harder he tried, the worse it got.

Until it all came crumbling down.


____________________

Thursdays end with art, my favorite class along with set and costume design, and I’m done by five thirty, which means my weekend officially starts in three hours.

Sure, I have lots of homework to tackle, but Maverick has an away game this weekend, and River has football, so I’ll have the entire house to myself. No smelly boys, no video games, and best of all, no random girls and no Kodiak.

I enter the art studio, my mood buoyant and rising further when I see the easels set up. I didn’t think we were going to be using them for another week or two, so this is an awesome surprise. In the middle of the room is a beautiful, black velvet chaise lounge.

Professor Meyer greets me with a wide smile.

“Human subject?” I ask, then shake my head. “I’m sorry. I’m just excited. How are you today, Professor?”

“No need to apologize, Lavender. And yes, human subject. We have a volunteer whose schedule isn’t very flexible, and today worked, so here we are.” Her smile and expression are ridiculously gleeful.